The present invention concerns the optimization of the size of a digital document.
Data processing has become an essential tool for creating, archiving and transmitting digital documents during the past few years. Used for business purposes for a long time, data processing has today become an essential means for recovering information throughout the entire world or distributing personal digital contents.
Thus many products are currently available on the market for enabling digital contents to be generated. Some are dedicated to the general public through their simplified graphical interface and their reduced functionalities. Others, dedicated to a more professional market, make it possible to generate more advanced contents which are sometimes referred to as composites.
A composite document means a document which in general contains a text part and one or more digital data parts. These data can for example be images, sound, sequences of animated images or graphics.
When a user creates a composite document, he usually commences by typing in a text and then including digital data. Next he optimizes the document so as to be able to transmit it as quickly as possible.
Once the document is created, the user may wish to broadcast it, that is to say to send it to a distant machine. Nevertheless, an inexperienced user can generate a large composite document, typically several kilobytes or even several megabytes, and send it to a friend by means of the Internet.
The problem of time transfer of a document is posed in particular if this user has a low-speed connection to the Internet. For example, with a theoretical 56 Kbit/second (7 kilobytes) modem connection, a document of 5 Mbytes is transferred in 11 minutes. Hence the need for the user to have an editing tool indicating to him the size of the document currently being edited. In this way, he can control the final size of the document.
Many tools for editing digital documents, making it possible to create composite documents, are already known. For example, the American company Adobe is developing an editing tool intended to create documents for sending over the Internet: “GoLive” www.adobe.com. Tutorials on Adobe GoLive available from:http://studio.adobe.com/learn/tips/index.html?product=golive.
This tool uses some of the functionalities of the image editor sold under the reference “Photoshop” (registered trade mark). “Photoshop” is a digital image editing software package which makes it possible to optimize an image for the purpose of sending it over the Internet. For this purpose, as soon as a user wishes to optimize an image, several degraded versions of the original image are offered to him. For each of these images, the software indicates the transfer time for the image for a low-rate Internet connection (28 Kb/s).
“GoLive” is an Internet site editing tool, that is to say a tool for creating pages in mark-up language. When a user wishes to insert an image in a page, “GoLive” uses the optimization functionality of “Photoshop”, that is to say a graphical window appears and offers to the user several degraded versions of the image. The user chooses one of them and the software inserts this image in the page.
When the user wishes to insert a second image, he proceeds in the same way as before, but, when choosing the version of this image, he asks himself what the final size of his document will be. Usually he inserts a version of the image, saves the document, looks at the size of the final document, changes the version of one of the images if the size is too great and so on until the size of his final document is reasonable. If the document (in this case a page in mark-up language in our example) is composed of several images, the user must usually re-edit these operations several times so as to degrade the least important images on the page (logos for example), and favor those which carry the semantic information of the page.
Such an editing process has the drawback of being tedious for the user.
The present invention precisely remedies this drawback.